A co-op shooter about space dwarves mining, drinking, and blasting alien bugs in the dark is a premise that many would find strange. I’m not one of them, I got this game the day it launched and kept on rocking in stone.
I’ve put 500+ hours into the Deep Rock Galactic game, and apart from the odd network hiccup, I can count the unfun moments on one finger. Namely, dying to a swarm of no-good bugs.
Rock and Stone, brothers!How We Rate
Now This is An AI-Proof Job!
You work for the Deep Rock Galactic mining company, which cares about your survival exactly as much as it cares about the quarterly profit. If you die, it’s a rounding error. One mission type literally has you retrieving gear from a team that got wiped out, so the company doesn’t lose anything more valuable than a few dwarves.
You and your friends will enter your pods, drill through layers of soil, and end up in the cavernous depths of this planet to yoink resources. We’ve got gold, but what we’re really looking for are Bismor, Croppa, Magnite, and other mineral deposits to make this operation successful.
RememberNitra and Red Sugar run this operation just as much as the miners you drill down with. You’ll need these for calling in supply pods and healing players. As soon as you see a faint glowing red light, point it out! If your scout is worth their salt, they will immediately zipline to that position and start mining this stuff.
To this end, the company generously provides you with an unlimited supply of flares on a cooldown. You also get your choice of weaponry to protect yourself from the dangers within this planet. And believe me, the sooner you get used to your weapon, the better, because the enemies underground have numbers on their side.
The Dark Is the Real Enemy
Once the drop pod hits the bottom of planet Hoxxes IV, you’ve got to put your game face on. The caves are fully deformable, vertical, and properly dark. Your headlamp only helps if something is right in your face, so you ration flares just to see where you’re going.
It’s oppressive in the best way, and it turns lighting into a resource you have to manage.
And the bugs don’t love the racket you make. Big ones, small ones, and the ones you only spot once they’re already chewing on you. They will hit you from all sides as soon as you start making noise, be it operating heavy machinery, putting down lights, or taking away the minerals that they consider their own.
Graphics, Sound, and Atmosphere: Pretty Caves, Ugly Bugs
Deep Rock Galactic won’t win any awards for photorealism, and it doesn’t try to. The chunky, low-poly art style looks like someone carved a sci-fi horror movie out of crystal and clay. On paper, it sounds cheap. In the caves, it works far better than it has any right to.
Each biome has a clear identity. The Crystalline Caverns shimmer with electric crystals that zap you if you get greedy. The Magma Core has lava rivers and exploding rocks, and the Glacial Strata has blizzards that freeze you in place.
The Fungus Bogs are a sticky, sludgy mess you’ll learn to hate with a passion. You can tell where you are at a glance, which helps when you’re 300 metres underground and completely lost.
The style also does real gameplay work. Minerals, enemies, and hazards are colour-coded and easy to read, so you can tell a Praetorian from a Grunt in half a second, even mid-swarm.
The visuals do have limits. Up close, textures are plain, and after a few hundred hours some tunnels start to blur together. When four dwarves are throwing explosions, fire, and particle effects at an endless horde, you’ll occasionally lose track of the one bug that matters. That’s why it’s an 8 and not higher.
The sound design keeps you on edge. Caves creak, rocks crumble somewhere out of sight, and distant chittering tells you something is crawling around nearby.
While you explore, it’s moody synth and ambient drones that make the caves feel huge and lonely. When a swarm hits, it switches to pounding electronic rock, and your heart rate climbs with it. The shift is so well timed that the music practically tells you when to reload.
The dwarves fill in the rest, the drunker the better. They shout “We’re rich!” at gold and yell for help when something grabs them. Mission Control sounds like a man who has lost far too many employees this week to care anymore.
Add the Lootbugs’ happy little squeaks right before you pickaxe them for gold, and the game has more personality than most AAA releases coming out today.
Four Classes, Four Ways to Move
This is my favourite thing about the game. While most horde shooters give you different guns, Deep Rock Galactic gives you different ways to get around, and each class changes how the squad tackles a cave:
- Gunner: a minigun, a bubble shield, and a zipline launcher for reusable cable bridges
- Engineer: auto turrets, plus platforms you can shoot onto walls for the whole team to climb
- Scout: a grappling gun and a flare gun that lights up an entire cavern
- Driller: titanium powerdrills, flamethrowers, and utmost lack of self preservation instincts
Your squad has to combine these tools to reach awkward objectives and avoid getting outmaneuvered in a fight. Finding a clever combo in the heat of the moment never gets old.
The Guns of DRG Make Me Really Happy
Deep Rock Galactic understands one thing better than most shooters: shooting a bug should feel good. Every gun has real weight, punchy audio, and a clear sense of impact.
Glyphids pop in a shower of goo, armour plates crack and fly off, and big targets shrug off body shots while you go hunting for their glowing weak spots. Landing a headshot on a Praetorian’s mouth never stops being satisfying.
Each class gets three primary and three secondary weapons, and they do very different jobs:
- Scout: the Deepcore GK2 assault rifle, the M1000 Classic marksman rifle, and the DRAK-25 Plasma Carbine, backed up by a sawn-off Boomstick, dual Zhukov SMGs, or the Boltshark crossbow.
- Gunner: the Lead Storm minigun, the Thunderhead autocannon, and the Hurricane guided rocket launcher, plus the Bulldog revolver, the BRT7 burst pistol, or the ArmsKore Coil Gun.
- Engineer: the Warthog shotgun, the Stubby Voltaic SMG, and the LOK-1 Smart Rifle, with a grenade launcher, the Breach Cutter, or the Shard Diffractor laser as a secondary.
- Driller: the CRSPR Flamethrower, the Cryo Cannon, and the Corrosive Sludge Pump, alongside the Subata pistol, the Experimental Plasma Charger, or the Colette Wave Cooker, which is basically a handheld microwave pointed at bugs.
The guns aren’t just different flavours of bullets. Fire sets bugs alight and spreads through a crowd, and cold freezes them solid so they shatter on the next hit. Electricity stuns and slows, and explosives clear crowds and break armour.
Enemies even resist some of these and are weak to others, so your squad’s loadouts work best when they complement each other.
Hit a bug with fire and then cold, or cold and then fire, and you trigger Thermal Shock, which deals a huge chunk of damage. A Driller with a Cryo Cannon and a Gunner with an incendiary build can melt an entire swarm together, and figuring that out without looking up guides made our day.
Killing Bugs Is The Bare Minimum
Every delve has a non-combat objective, such as mining a quantity of rare ore or stealing alien eggs. This is where the game becomes a tactical puzzle. Whoever is working on the objective can’t defend themselves, so they rely on their friends to keep the bugs away.
Management in the Deep Rock Galactic game rarely lets you tackle these jobs at random. Instead, you receive these missions bundled into multi-stage operations called Assignments. Activating an Assignment from your terminal can task you with any of the following missions:
- Mining Expedition: The quintessential corporate assignment where you must delve deep into linear cave systems to extract a quota of Morkite, navigating tight tunnels and open caverns along the way.
- Egg Hunt: A high-risk bio-extraction task requiring you to dig alien eggs out of organic, pulsing walls, which instantly triggers aggressive and unpredictable Glyphid swarms.
- On-Site Refining: A mechanical puzzle that demands laying a network of pipelines from liquid Morkite wells back to a central refinery, then defending the leaking pipes from bugs during the extraction process.
- Salvage Operation: A frantic rescue mission where you must repair broken mini-MULEs and stay locked within a tight defensive perimeter to power up an old, abandoned Drop Pod for escape.
- Point Extraction: A race against time in a massive open cavern where you must mine heavy Aquarq gems and carry them back to a heavily armed orbital platform before escalating enemy waves overwhelm the zone.
- Escort Duty: A high-stakes protection detail where you must defend and repair “Doretta”, a massive, automated bulldozer with a giant drill mounted front and center, as she plows through solid rock to harvest a rare Ommoran Heartstone.
- Elimination: A direct hunt into the dark to track down and pop massive alien cocoons, deliberately waking up colossal, armored Dreadnought bosses for an intense tactical firefight.
- Industrial Sabotage: A multi-stage heist to infiltrate a Rival Tech facility, disable its force fields by cracking power stations, and destroy a massive, floating Caretaker boss to steal its data rack.
- Deep Scan: A subterranean exploration mission where you use a sonic resonator to locate buried resonance crystals, ultimately calling down a Drillevator to descend into a deep mantle chamber to harvest rare Morkite Seeds.
You can play solo, and the company will lend you a small combat drone to ease the pain, but this game shines in a four-player group. Dust off your mic, gather your friends, and embrace the dwarfism. Trust me, it changes you in ways you wouldn’t understand.
Deep Rock Galactic’s Progression Respects Your Time
You start as a clean-shaven newbie and have to earn your big, bushy beard. Kills, missions, and other milestones earn perk points, which you spend on things like extra run speed or an EMP burst after you’re knocked down.
When you start out, your terminal will have a starting assignment chain. Prioritize these missions as they systematically unlock new mission types, biomes, and critical gameplay features. As you pour hours into a specific class, you will eventually hit the level 25 cap, triggering an assignment to earn your first Promotion.
Promotion resets your dwarf’s class level to one, but you retain all unlocked weapons, modifications, and perks. More importantly, it unlocks the vast, subterranean vault of DRG’s endgame content. Once promoted, you receive a permanent Trilite Key, allowing you to activate random, high-stakes Machine Events discovered during standard missions.
Guns, armour, and gear can all be upgraded with cold, hard cash from the mines, and there’s plenty of cosmetic stuff to chase too.
One of the most player-friendly aspects of Deep Rock Galactic is its approach to seasonal content. The Performance Pass and Cosmetic Tree are completely free, and nothing is ever permanently locked away. When a season ends, every single unclaimed weapon framework, beard, and victory pose is distributed into Cargo Crates, Lost Packs, or the Matrix Core pool.
Deep Rock Galactic on Steam and Mac
Deep Rock Galactic on Steam runs like a dream on PC, smoothly handling hundreds of screaming alien bugs exploding on your screen at once without turning your computer into a mini-nuclear reactor.
Thanks to its chunky low-poly art style and stylishly blocky cave architecture, the game chugs along just fine even on laptops. Hell, I tried it on a beat-up old Acer Aspire 7 from six years ago and got a steady 60 FPS, so you’ll be fine.
If you are playing on a Mac, you can get incredible performance by running the game through CrossOver in a Windows 10 64-bit bottle. It will need some tinkering and changing some files, but it’s nothing you can’t handle if you give it 15 minutes.
Deep Rock Galactic on M2 Mac & Free Whisky Setup
I also tested running Deep Rock Galactic on an M2 Mac using Whisky if you really dislike paying. The process is remarkably straightforward but comes with its own quirks and performance trade-offs. Here’s what you need to do:
- Get Homebrew: Fire up your terminal and install it using the command found on the official Homebrew Website.
- Install Whisky: Run the terminal command brew install –cask whisky to download the compatibility layer Whisky.
- Create a Bottle: Build a new Windows 10 bottle inside Whisky and name it “Steam Win”.
- Install Steam: Download the Windows version of Steam (click the Windows icon on the Steam Website), hit Run at the bottom right of your Whisky bottle menu, and select the installer.
- Launch & Download: Log into Steam, download Deep Rock Galactic, and make sure it is configured to run using DirectX 11 (DX11).
The low-poly design is highly forgiving, but emulation overhead takes a toll on high settings. On high configurations, I saw my frame rates drop from 120+ FPS all the way down to a chugging 30 to 60 FPS whenever hordes of bugs rushed the screen, alongside heavy stutters back at the Space Rig.
To fix this, I found the optimal sweet spot is setting the graphics to Medium and capping the frames at 60 FPS, which keeps gameplay perfectly stable.
Quick Tip For Mac UsersBecause you will be playing in Windowed Mode, your cursor will occasionally slip past the game boundaries, breaking your tracking. To recenter your mouse in a pinch, double-tap Escape to toggle the menu, or use Command + Tab to reset focus.
You should also keep in mind that Whisky is not currently being developed, so the $74 Crossover fee might be a necessity in case you want to try more games on Mac. Either that or check out our Best Mac Games on Steam guide for alternatives.
Is Deep Rock Galactic Worth It?
Yes, and it isn’t even close. It’s a PvE class shooter with procedural maps, a sharp sense of humour, and a “just one more delve” loop. If you have three friends, this is an easy recommendation.
I will do the classic game journalist thing and call this Helldivers with corporate goals and less patriotism. Having a cold one with the boys after a hard mining operation might just be the best feeling in gaming. Just make sure you throw your empty mug at them so they know you love them.
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